Adding to the personalities in boxing part...
In the past you had the Trinidads, the De La Hoyas. You had Barrera and Morales waging wars and in their primes. Pacquiao was in his prime. Hatton had the whole UK behind him. The heavyweights, before Wlad came in and chloroformed the division and fans' interest in it.... had Tyson, Lewis, etc. The division was more exciting. You had the "Great White American Hopes" like Pavlik, before he went south. Most of these guys were likable, and good ambassadors to their sport. There were plenty of mega-wars involving these and other fighters I know I forgot to mention.
Nowadays all these guys are gone. Floyd could've been one of those, but he's too polarizing for people to get 100% behind him. Besides that, who's left? GGG's great, but doesn't have the mass appeal of any of the above, for whatever reason. Wlad is gone, thankfully, but the riff-raff that's left behind doesn't yank the public's chain. The big names just aren't as big as they used to be.
Who knows... maybe it's cyclic, and we're about to enter into another golden age. There's a lot of young, exciting talent coming up. We're going to need some true wars and rivalries (like Barrera-Morales, Ali-Frazier, Gatti-Ward) to get the public interest back. Unfortunately, MMA is here to stay, and boxing's just going to have to share the attention.
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